A Five Year Sentence (5 page)

It was eleven o'clock. She had noted the time of their last meeting and reckoned that Brian had ascended the library steps round about eleven-thirty. She would be there waiting for him. She was too unsure of their relationship to risk a late arrival. She went to her diary, and before filling in the day's commissions, she flicked back the pages and delighted in the red-crayoned ticks that dotted every page. Not once had there been a lapse of duty. She decided that each day she would grow more bold, for there was more joy in a tick that had been perilously
earned. So she wrote, ‘Went to the library and met Brian' and since that order was so easily executed, she dared herself to another. And with a trembling flourish, she wrote, ‘I kissed him.' But even she knew that as a cheat. An order that incurred her own activity was easily honourable. She had to set herself a more stringent test. So she crossed out the initial command, and wrote instead, ‘Brian kissed me.' Then, fearful of the consequences, she left the house.

She was early and there were few people in the library. She wandered along the fiction shelves keeping one eye on the clock. By eleven-thirty she had combed the novel section, and fearful of drawing attention to her long loitering, she hid herself in the niche where the catalogues were kept. From this vantage point she had a good view of the entrance door, and there she took her stand, flipping through endless titles and subject matter until she heard the church clock strike twelve. She began to panic, less at Brian's non-appearance, than at the receding possibility of ticking off the diary's order. For the first time since the beginning of her sentence, she began to dislike the diary a little, to resent its impudent hold on her. Its order had been cruelly specific. It was not any man she was to meet at the library. It was Brian, and it was Brian's mouth that was ordained to land on hers. She went to the reference library and tiptoed self-consciously through the learned silence. She even tried the children's library, allowing for the possibility that his mother had, in the course of the last week, degenerated into second childhood. But nowhere was there a sign of him. She went back to the fiction shelves and waited. She decided she would give him till one o'clock. She would postpone any further decision until then.

She took a small mirror out of her bag to check on her makeup. It had clearly lost the bloom of its first application. She blotted the streaky foundation with powder and applied a new layer of lipstick. She sniffed and noted that the ‘stream of violets' had dried up completely, and she began to dislike Brian a little. She picked out a book at random and started to read, but she couldn't concentrate and she read and re-read the first sentence over and over again. She was aware of a man standing
beside her, shifting from foot to foot as he pretended to read a book. He shifted sideways towards her, then, looking up, he said, ‘Would you come to the pictures with me?'

She looked at him. His face leered from its low forehead to barely perceptible chin. A slither of spit dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He held the open library book towards her, inviting her to view the postcard he'd slipped between the pages. She feared the surge of excitement that throbbed in the region of her legs. It was sinful, she knew, and the temptation to look at the postcard was overwhelming. Yet she knew she must not look at it, so she kept her eyes reluctantly on his repellent leer. Then, mindful of her diary's orders, she said, ‘No. You won't do at all.' And she moved away quickly because she was suddenly afraid of him, and out of the library and into the street, not knowing what to do, and not daring to go home and face the first disobeyed order of her sentence. It was now a quarter to one and it was clear to Miss Hawkins that Brian was otherwise engaged. She thought perhaps he might be ill, and he had no means of letting her know of his indisposition. Then she was suddenly anxious, wanting to care for him, wanting to shield him from the constant and nagging demands of his old mother. She opened her bag and re-read the address. He lived only a short bus ride from the library and it seemed suddenly right and proper that she should visit him and learn the cause of his non-appearance. She walked to the bus stop and waited. It did not occur to her that an unannounced call at Brian's house might be inopportune. Foremost in her mind was her diary's commission, and anything that facilitated its execution was in order.

Romilly Road, which was where he lived, was itself on the bus route. She knew it was a long road, a local High Street, and she would have to watch closely at the numbers to gauge the right stop for 147. She noticed that the supermarket span one large block, and its entrances started at number 53. She got up from her seat. She guessed that the next stop would be the closest. The bus pulled up outside number 93. It meant a short walk. She hurried. She did not want time for preparation. She would knock at his door and play it by ear.

But when she reached the house, she saw that a small group of people were waiting outside. And at the kerbside stood a hearse. She hesitated, but only in her step, for her train of thought from Brian's last card-giving gesture to his illness, or accident perhaps, to his ultimate demise, was unbroken, and the sight of the old woman, presumably his mother, now being led out of the house, was its sole interruption. A single hot tear stung Miss Hawkins' powdered cheek, and reminded her that she had not wept for many many years. Poor Morris, hooked up to her orphan-womanhood, had been the dead eye-witness of her last tear. With the back of her glove she wiped it roughly from her cheek. There would be a time for grieving. Bereft as she was, the now transparent impossibility of ticking off her diary's order grieved her even more. She could rush into the house and perhaps catch sight of his face before the wood covered him, but the box was not the library that the diary had ordered. She could perhaps, too, plant a kiss on his shrunken cold lips, but such passivity was not what the day's order had in mind. There was now no hope even of a partial fulfilment. She would rub it out, remove it with ink-erasing fluid, and pretend to her dying day that it had never been there at all.

Miss Hawkins stood aside as the old woman passed her. Her supports, on either side her, took her to the kerb, where she waited, tear-stained, as the coffin, borne by four men, their faces painted with manufactured sorrow, emerged from the front door. The small crowd watched it into the hearse. Then the old lady was helped into the car behind and seated between the two women who supported her. Slowly the car drew away and another pulled up at the gate. A cluster of people walked towards it, and one of them, taking Miss Hawkins as a friend and mourner, took her arm and led her into the car. Miss Hawkins mutely obeyed. The thought crossed her mind to apologise for her non-funeral attire, but since no-one seemed to notice, she did not therefore wish to draw attention to her incongruous clothing. She sat stiffly on the edge of the black upholstery, allowing room for those she thought more entitled by kinship to tears. But somehow she felt that of all of the mourners, no-one
had loved him as she, and the tears now rolled uncontrollably down her cheeks. No-one in the car said a word. Each dwelt in their own abstractions which seemed from their expressions to have little to do with grief. One of them, Miss Hawkins noticed, was actually smiling to himself, and she seethed with a sudden propriety right of chief mourner, and wished to order him out of the car.

It had begun to rain, and Miss Hawkins was glad of it for it seemed right and proper for a funeral. She remembered it was raining when Morris died. She could still hear the sound of its beating on the bathroom window-pane, as if calling fearful attention to the horror inside. Even the following day, with the bathroom lysolled and scrubbed, the rain still beat on the pane, as if to call out a terrible secret that still hid itself there, and every day it rained, for so long afterwards. Yet there had been no box in the rain, no hearse or black car in the orphanage drive. Matron had said it was all a terrible dream, so why should she have seen a hearse or a black car? But she hadn't seen Morris either and she knew better than to ask matron where Morris had gone, for in her heart she felt that matron had spirited Morris away, or eaten her perhaps, to destroy the evidence of her neglect and cruelty. And in the back of the black car, she crossed her legs furiously, rubbing knee against knee with an implacable rage, translating her soul's outrage into a negotiable physical pain. She reckoned that matron would now be in her eighties. It was still possible that she was alive and within Miss Hawkins' joyful reach and she could clasp her hands round the starched and wrinkled neck and wring it into eternity. Her neighbour on the black upholstery, catching sight of her tear-stained face, wondered why Miss Hawkins was suddenly smiling.

The shops and houses were tailing off and the landscape was gradually rural. Through the windscreen, Miss Hawkins caught sight of the entrance to the cemetery on the left side of the road, and sundry heads of marble angels, their bodies obscured by a high fence. The car slowed down and turned into the open wrought-iron gates. ‘We're there,' somebody said, and though totally superfluous, they were the first words, that had been
spoken aloud. The road between the graves was serpentine, and the speed of the car was adjusted accordingly. Nevertheless, the passengers were swinging from one side to another on the sudden hair-pin bends, and Miss Hawkins delighted in the abrupt nudge of thigh on thigh. On one of these involuntary moves, the man next to her moved his feet rather further than the car's swerve warranted, and on the next turn, she boldly did likewise, so that on arrival, their feet were interlocked like a lover's knot. The car stopped, and the driver rushed in turn to each passenger door. He was anxious to get out of the rain, and he snorted at each door, urging them out with his wordless irritation. Then, when the car was empty, he hurried back into the driving seat and watched their mourning black turn grey with drizzle. Then, when they had safely reached the open grave, he lit a cigarette and pulled out the comic he had hidden under the seat.

Miss Hawkins hovered on the perimeter of the grave. She was aware of her foot-companion who was standing behind her. Her ankle still throbbed with the touch of his black serge turn-up. She hadn't looked at him in the car. Somehow their nether encounter precluded a facial familiarity, for it would have diluted the anonymity of their alliance, and thus destroyed it. She would not turn her face to look at him, but she would follow him back to the car, and on the hair-pin bends on the way home, they would renew their blind connection.

The drizzle persisted and seemed to muzzle the words of the preacher whose voice floated and sank over the heads of the small assembly, occasionally swimming into Miss Hawkins' earshot. She caught the words, ‘our beloved brother', ‘dust' and ‘ashes', and through the gaps of legs in front of her, she saw the coffin being lowered into the ground. Then the old woman stepped forward, supported by the same guards, and weakly shovelled a few clumps of earth on to the box. Others followed her example, and then slowly they began to disperse, making their way back to the cars. The driver, seeing their approach, hastily stubbed his cigarette and hid the comic under the seat. Then, composing his face as befitted the occasion, and cursing the eternal drizzle, he got out of the car to assist his passengers.
Miss Hawkins waited while the others left, till she had a full and uninterrupted view of Brian's box. She did not wonder how he had died. The manner of his demise could not effect the unavoidable disobedience of the diary's order. She was sorry that they would not meet again, but she was angry, too, that he had so inconvenienced her strict duty rota. Once again she decided to erase the order in her little book, and to rub it out into a solid belief that it had never been there at all. She turned and walked back to the car. The driver was once more huddled in his seat, but a man stood at the passenger door holding it open for her entry. He was smiling at her and she had to look at his face, and suddenly she didn't want to sit next to him on the way home. His brazen face-flashing had implied the need of a relationship which was nowhere near what Miss Hawkins had in mind. Thus ended their brief and misunderstood affair. She sat beside him because that was the only place, but she kept her feet firmly aslant, and she gripped the black upholstery with her hands so that she could maintain her position. But even on the sharpest S-bend, the man made no surreptitious move. The message of her snubbing feet had been clear.

‘I could do with a nice cup of tea,' one of the mourners said.

‘Well, Rita'll have the kettle on I'm sure,' said another.

Miss Hawkins could have done with a cup of tea, and she hoped that she would be invited back to the house of mourning to refresh herself with the others. It was possible that a formal invitation was not necessary and that she would be included in the post-funeral arrangements as naturally and as casually as she had been first involved. She looked out of the window, and noticed how quickly the houses passed by and how different it had been on the outgoing journey, when there had been time to record the pattern of each set of net curtains, the colour of each front gate, and the growth in every garden. Within a very short time, they were lapping the edges of the High Street and after a few traffic-light stops, the car drew up at Brian's house. This time the driver refused the drizzle, and sat firmly in his seat, convinced he'd been civil enough for one outing. The front door of the house was still open, and Miss Hawkins could see the old
lady disappearing inside. Then the occupants of the second car followed, and Miss Hawkins was somehow included in their number. She was suddenly curious as to how Brian had lived, his furnishings, his family photographs, and even perhaps to talk to his mother, but at a distance, she decided, recalling the dictionary definition of Mrs Watts' condition.

The old lady was already seated in a high-backed chair in the front parlour of the house. On each side stood her attendants. There was some resemblance between them, Miss Hawkins noticed. On their faces was the pained look of sour and guilty kin, but she was loathe to enquire their identity, since it was obviously assumed by all and sundry that she was a close friend of the family. The chairs were arranged in a circle, and a tea-trolley stood in the centre. It was laden with tea-cups, but the tea was yet to be brewed. Miss Hawkins was invited to seat herself and from the growing hum of voices it seemed that conversation was now in order. Miss Hawkins was suddenly nervous. The notion of gatecrashing another's grief was faintly offensive, but how could she tell them that she too was entitled to tears. She was conscious that the old woman was looking at her, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see her enlisting the aid of her supporters to identify the unknown visitor. The supporter shook her head and enquired of her partner, who did likewise. Then one of them disappeared as if to investigate further. Miss Hawkins wished fervently that the tea would come. The old woman was still staring and Miss Hawkins thought that she should leave. But then the woman's suspicions, whatever they were, would be confirmed. Besides, she was very thirsty. She would wait for a quick cup of tea and a cake – those éclairs looked delicious – and without leave-taking, she would quietly slip away. The investigator was threading her way back through the small group in the parlour, and Miss Hawkins was conscious of a sudden break in conversations and she knew that accusing eyes were pretending not to look at her. She got up quickly, nodded to the old woman, and, avoiding any possible cross-examination, she slipped out of the room. She walked with her head down, in the hope of obliterating all eye-witness memory.
But in doing so, she was unable to see the tray of two full china tea-pots and its bearer. At that moment, needing to see her direction, she chose to raise her head, catching the corner of the tray on her forehead. She heard the crash of china about her, and saw the spluttering of hot tea-leaves on her coat. But all that was trivial in comparison to her sudden view of the tray-bearer, empty-handed now, wet and tea-less, and staring at her in total disbelief. Which was an expression she shared as she deciphered each feature of his bewildered face and knew it for Brian. Both gave voice at the same time, and both with the same question. ‘What are you doing here?'